‘Words taught me to fly and not to speak. Showed me my own word shape, built me walls and bars to keep words out
and finally gave me fire for each bridge until I could not be reached but by birds’98
- Liam Aspin, ‘Wirds’
“Stranger,” his father answered, weeping softly, “the land you’ve reached is the very one you’re after”’
- Homer The Odyssey Book 24:310-31199
In the previous chapter I looked at the field of poetry therapy in the context of theories of writing and of language—and at how amateur writers engage with the practice of writing therapy in therapeutic writing groups. Through of a review of the literature, I also established that the majority of work in this area which is practice-orientated (i.e. gives an account of therapeutic creative writing done by specific individuals and groups) is limited to writing by
amateur writers⏤that is, people not used to writing for an audience whose
primary purpose is to communicate an emotional state rather than to create
art. In what follows I will extend this exploration of the relationship between
poetry and therapy into the domain of the professional poet/artist and consider whether we can identify therapeutic processes at play in work whose
98Aspin, Liam (2000) ‘Wirds’ Scintilla 4 p. 36
99 Homer The Odyssey (Trans. Robert Fagles) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), p.
primary purpose is aesthetic. What was also established in the previous chapter was that one thing figurative creative writing offers individuals is a way of re-configuring the world in more psychologically helpful ways. This is a key theme for this chapter: I both explore whether, and how, the professional poets interviewed engage in world-making or changing through writing, and also situate the points arising from the interview material within (predominantly) person-centred theories of creativity.
In this chapter I will explore the relationship that professional poets have to writing. I use the term professional only to distinguish between those who write solely for therapeutic or developmental reasons and those who write predominantly as a form of art. I want to preface what I go on to say below by saying that this is not a distinction that this thesis upholds: rather—as I will demonstrate in this chapter—in my view all expressive writing occurs in relation to the writer’s mental health, although this is not an idea that is commonly put forward as there is a feeling that this is somehow undermining to the status of published works as art. I take the position that writing for therapy and writing for art’s sake are not mutually exclusive activities. As already noted, generally a very firm line is drawn between poetry as therapy and poetry as art: the general consensus is that the former is somehow a different (or lesser) enterprise; this view is largely predicated on looking at the outcomes of writing—not at the process. However, in the visual arts there is a liminal space between the two areas of operation which is missing from writing on poetry: the art of children, psychiatric patients and prisoners who create art without the conventional structures of art training and art production is often categorised as outsider art.100 Whilst this term does confirm that a
100 This is the Tate Gallery definition of ‘outsider art’ as it appears on their website https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/o/outsider-art
distinction is to be made between the art of the trained and that produced by the amateur, nevertheless it does make space in the canon for such works to exist and to be thought about in terms of aesthetics. In some cases outsider
artists cross the divide and are accepted into the mainstream. For example,
the painter Ken Kiff—who produced a series of works101 chronicling his
experiences in psychotherapy—is one such artist who has made this shift. Similar examples of creative writers are hard to find102; the boundary between
what is therapy and what is art is more rigid when it comes to writing.
What I will suggest in this chapter is that the processes which occur in both types of writing—professional and amateur—are fundamentally the same: that is, all poetry offers the opportunity to facilitate personal agency, allows for the expression and working through of experience, and is fundamentally
transformative. That is, what we observe amateur writers doing in the therapy
group can also been seen in the practice of professional poets. Some commentators have held the view that seeing poetry in this way somehow undermines its status as art.103 What I will show in this chapter is that a poet
may be both trained and artistically skilled and yet nevertheless be engaging in the therapeutic functions and potentials that poetry as a broader activity offers. That is, the process does not affect the product of writing; rather, art which is psychologically informed can simultaneously be aesthetically
successful.
101 Kiff, Ken (1971-2001) The Sequence was exhibited at The Sainsbury Centre for
Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Norwich in 2018/19
102 The radical feminist playwright and thinker Valerie Solanas (1936-1988), who
became famous for shooting the artist Andy Warhol, is the only one that comes to mind; Solanas was diagnosed as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and her work is largely read as being satirical⏤a reading Solanas herself disagreed with
103 The Canadian poet Anne Carson makes this point in an interview with The
As this chapter will address praxis, I have prefaced the interviews with practicing poets included here with a discussion of the person-centred understanding of creative process. As indicated in the previous chapter, person-centred accounts of creative therapies largely orientate themselves around an enquiry into individual process—the work of Natalie Rogers is notable in this regard. The person-centred approach holds that, ‘every human being has the potential to be creative…the psychotherapeutic process is to awaken the creative life-force energy’.104 To engage in art-making is to
engage with what Carl Rogers terms the actualizing tendency: this is the inherent tendency of the organism to develop its capacities in the direction of maintaining, enhancing and reproducing itself;105 the job of therapy is to
simply provide the right conditions for the individual’s actualizing tendency to flourish, and engaging in creative activity is one way to provide such a conducive environment.
After conducting the interviews for this chapter my overall sense is that the process of writing is fundamentally related to the construction of identity— or the maintenance of that sense of self and a facilitation of a sense of agency. One of the key ideas that I want to explore in this thesis that having a sense of personal identity is a necessary element—one of the cornerstones— of what might be termed mental health or well-being and that this is something that can be achieved through the interaction with language. The other, related, idea that underpins the writing of this thesis is, at a fundamental level, we are
creatures of language: what I mean is that meaning itself is something that
104 Rogers, N. The Creative Connection: the Expressive Arts as Healing (Palo Alto:
Science & Behavior Books, 1993), cover notes
105 Glossary definition of ‘actualizing tendency’ given in Nelson-Jones, R. Theory
and Practice of Counselling and Therapy (fourth edition) (London: Sage, 2006), p. 459
we as humans engage with in a constant creative process—and that language is the arena and stuff of this most crucial of activities. This idea is explored in greater depth in the chapters which follow. It suffices to say here that
language has the power to fashion our experience of both our self and our environment, and creative language operations in particular⏤which is how
we might view poetry⏤offer opportunities to re-make our reality. In this chapter I will explore this sense with three published poets for whom writing is a regular practice and a serious craft. I talked with them about their process and experience in and of writing, in a series of semi-structured interviews. Some of the questions were sent to them in advance and address the premise stated above: that writing poetry is an exercise in identity-formation as it relates to well-being. I left spaces, though, for other questions to emerge and enter the discussion as the interviews unfolded. I also asked the writers to
formulate their own questions prior to conducting the
interviews⏤interestingly, none did. Overall, my aim in putting the questions together was to encourage the poets to interrogate their own reasons for and relationship to writing poetry. What I wanted to offer these writers was the opportunity to construct the narrative of their process.
In the last chapter I suggested that writing poetry may have three key functions. The first two are that writing promotes a sense of self-agency, in that writing is an act and thus in engaging in that act makes us actors; and that writing offers the opportunity to re-write our experience, and in this way, we may process and in an important sense shape our experience as a personal narrative. The third function is in many ways a product of the first two, and that is that writing is involved with the formation and maintenance of personal identity—and that this is a process of self-fashioning construction in ways
which support good psychological functioning at the individual level. Erving Goffmann introduces the idea of ‘performative identity’ in writing about the qualitative research interview: ‘What talkers undertake to do is not to provide information to a recipient, but to present dramas to an audience. Indeed, it seems that we spend more of our time not engaged in giving information but in giving shows’106. It may be that the narratives of process offered by the
writers in the interviews are as much a construction (in fact, the concept of performative identity suggests that this is a given) as their poetry. For the purposes of analysing the interviews however, I have taken their statements at face-value. The thinking behind this methodological approach—which is simply to read the transcripts with a view to drawing out common and uncommon themes across interviews—is that as the topic of each narrative is itself a performance of a constructed world, then such narratives can be nothing other than the truth. In the interviews included in this chapter I spoke with poets about what their experience of writing is, with regard to notions of agency, the transformation of experience and issues of personal identity. In addition I try to explore whether Carl Rogers’ ideas regarding creativity and therapy, specifically that through the creative process an individual may facilitate the actualizing tendency and reclaim the locus of evaluation, something which is discussed at greater length below. I argue that these allied concepts are central to the function of writing which bestows a sense of agency, and thus promotes psychological well-being.
All three poets chosen for this chapter write ‘seriously’ and identify, to some degree, with the idea of being a poet; all have published their work, and two also teach creative writing in higher education settings. The idea of including
106 Goffmann, E. 1974 pp. 508-509, cited in Kohler Riessman, Catherine Narrative
only published writers here is not to belittle the importance of the work being done by the amateur writers in the groups (for a discussion of these writers, see previous chapter); rather, it is done with the idea that poets who have engaged more ‘seriously’ with their practice, over a sustained period, may have formulated their understanding of how and why they work, and thus be better able to articulate their relationships with writing. As the interview sample is small, as a result of completing the research for this chapter I do not expect to be able to say anything definitive about poets and poetry in general pertaining to a relationship to writing. I will only be able to explore what these particular poets do. Nevertheless, I do hope to be able to dig a little deeper into the processes at play for the writers in this sample and be able to comment to how the ideas regarding writing put forward in this thesis appear—or do not appear—in the thinking, writing and experience of the poets interviewed. So, this will be a chapter which is more about explorations than conclusions.
Toward a Theory of Creativity
In 1954 Carl Rogers published a paper entitled ‘Toward a Theory of Creativity’107 in which he sets out a ‘tentative theory of creativity’ and asserts the importance of the creative act, defining it as a ‘social need’ which has profound implications for all cultural constructs—including our education systems and all scientific endeavour (‘I maintain there is a desperate social need for the creative behavior of creative individuals’108). In the creative act Rogers also sees what he terms the ‘anxiety of separateness’ (feelings of being alone, lost or abnormal) and the human desire to communicate as being in
107 Rogers, Carl R. (1954) ‘Toward a Theory of Creativity’ ETC: A Review of
General Semantics, Vol. XII, No. 4, pp. 249-260
play (‘He does not create in order to communicate, but once having created he desires to share this new aspect of himself-in-relation-to-his-environment with others’109). According to Rogers, the necessary preconditions for creativity are: an openness to experience which is organismic, that is, not limited to pre-conceived notions (e.g. ‘trees are green’); an experiential
attitude which has more immediacy than is common, which is permissive to
ambiguity and change. Most significantly, Rogers identifies the creative process with the locus of evaluation and the actualizing tendency; both of these concepts are discussed below.
Something which is particularly pertinent to the ideas I am exploring in this chapter (namely, that writing poetry is in part driven by the poet’s desire for a sense of identity and personal agency) is that here Rogers speaks of the creative process as being linked to the construction and individuation of the personal ‘I’. He suggests that a concomitant of the creative act is to draw individual experience into a coherent expression (Rogers gives the example of a scientist constructing a theory which focusses on those elements which builds towards the cogent establishing of knowledge; similarly, he sees the writer ‘selecting those words and phrases which give unity to his expression’110). The idea of the self (the self-concept) is an important one in Rogers’ approach and one which embeds the notion of the performance of a
creative act in its very definition:
[the self-concept is] … the organized consistent conceptual gestalt composed of perceptions of the characteristics of 'I' or 'me' and the perceptions of the relationships of the 'I' or 'me' to others and to various aspects of life, together with the values attached to these perceptions. It is a gestalt which is available to awareness though not necessarily in
109 ibid. p.356 110 ibid. p355
awareness. It is a fluid and changing gestalt, a process, but at any given moment it is a specific entity.111
The self-concept is essentially a creative act because it involves a dynamic engagement between self and environment—the product of which is not
fixed, but rather a process in which the self is always emerging or becoming.
McLeod112 makes the interesting point that the self-concept might have been
more accurately named the self-process, as this term more precisely captures the fluid, ever-changing nature of the self as conceived by Carl Rogers. Nevertheless, Rogers points out that the self-concept is (albeit momentarily) also a specific entity—a figure in the ground of the experiential flow—and in this way the point of such engagement is the creation of a unified sense of
self.
111 Rogers, Carl. R. (1959). ‘A Theory of Therapy, Personality Relationships as
Developed in the Client-Centered Framework’ collected in (Ed.) S. Koch. Psychology: A study of a Science. Vol. 3: ed. Formulations of the Person and the Social Context (New York: McGraw Hill, 1959)
112 McLeod, John Introduction to Counselling (New York: McGraw Hill, 2009)
The Actualizing Tendency
The concept of the actualizing tendency was first proposed by Rogers in the 1950s113 and remains one of the fundamental principles of his client centered
approach. The actualizing tendency uses a biological model to refer to the motivational force which lies within the individual to grow towards optimum psychological functioning. Thus, the actualizing tendency is also the sole motivating force of therapeutic change. As with plants, the conditions for growth are crucial. The role of the therapist is, then, to provide what Roger’s terms the ‘necessary and sufficient’ conditions for therapeutic change and growth:
‘—Two persons are in psychological contact.
—The first, whom we shall term the client, is in a state of incongruence, being vulnerable or anxious.
—The second person, whom we shall term the therapist, is congruent or integrated in the relationship.
—The therapist experiences unconditional positive regard for the client. —The therapist experiences an empathic understanding of the client's internal frame of reference and endeavors to communicate this experience to the client.
—The communication to the client of the therapist's empathic understanding and unconditional positive regard is to a minimal degree achieved.
No other conditions are necessary. If these six conditions exist, and continue over a period of time, this is sufficient. The process of constructive personality change will follow.’114
With the popularisation of Rogers’ work in the 1970s the original six conditions proposed were reinterpreted and reformulated as the three ‘core
113 Rogers, Carl R. (1957). ‘The Necessary and Sufficient Conditions of Therapeutic
Personality Change’, Journal of Consulting Psychology, 21(2), 95-103
conditions’ currently taught in person-centred trainings⏤empathy,
congruence, and unconditional positive regard.
The relevance of this to the current project is that Rogers goes on to explicitly align creativity with the actualizing tendency (‘[creativity] appears to be the same tendency which we discover so deeply as the curative force in psychotherapy—man’s tendency to actualize himself, to become his potentialities115’); and in doing so he identifies creative writing as an essentially therapeutic act as a part of its very being.
As already noted, Natalie Rogers has focussed her work very specifically on the role the creative arts may play in psychotherapy, developing a theory which she terms the creative connection. Natalie Rogers’ work is a development of Carl’s and should be seen as refinement of the principles of the client centered approach which concentrates particularly on the function/s of creativity. The central principle of the creative connection is that (as Carl Rogers indicates) creativity and psychotherapy are parallel processes. In developing her model Natalie Rogers posits that the various forms of creative expression (movement, visual art, writing, sound) work together to facilitate therapeutic change. She describes the therapeutic work as, ‘the deep faith in the individual’s drive to become fully herself’116. Natalie Rogers makes a specific connection between creativity and the actualizing tendency, and suggests that the conditions of worth117 must be confronted and the locus of
115Rogers, Carl R. (1954) ‘Toward a Theory of Creativity’ ETC: A Review of